So, imagine if Scott Cawthon released the first 2 nights of the first fnaf game (let’s imagine that the concept of a “children’s horror franchise” already existed as it does today), and then promised to release the rest as standalone pieces, but before that: released merch, had insane amount of YouTube videos, started work on a movie and announced a line of whatever the 2014 equivalent of NFTs were. Poppy Playtime is less of a game and more of an experiment to see how much money a guy can make off an incredibly safe (and apparently stolen) “videogame”. This is everything that indie games shouldn’t be.

From the genius minds of “pickle rick” comes Justin Roiland’s new mongolian torture device. Judiciously juvenile and uniquely unfunny, high on life delivers an innovative take on the first person shooter genre by doing what games don’t dare to do: break the fourth wall.

High on Life’s greatest strength may perhaps be its ability to remind me of other things I enjoy. Other, better games and movies that this game references gratuitously, game mechanics from other titles that don’t work as well here, or voice actors from shows and movies I like. On its own, however, High on Life delivers nothing of substance. It’s a barebones first person shooter with all the uninteresting “features” of Justin Roiland’s “high IQ” writing style.

If I were to summarise High on Life with a single word, it would be “repetitive”. Everything from the pacing, to enemy encounters, environments, to jokes and writing feels like they’ve been mass produced by an algorithm (hilarious considering the real AI art littered across various rooms in the game). Between each bounty mission are moments of drawn out melodrama, featuring thoroughly uninteresting side plots with half of a resolution where the bulk of the conflict is delivered through unskippable dialogue scenes the player is forced to sit through. The game’s joke writing is also poor: incessant profanities and stuttering are Roiland’s often baffling substitutes for jokes, and when it’s not that High on Life uses lampshading, references or repetition to drive home a joke that really wasn’t funny the first time. Lampshading in this game is also something I dislike, where high on life makes fun of tropes in other games and then proceeds to do them anyway. High on Life also never shuts up; characters are always talking whether you like it or not, and they rarely have anything of any value to say. The fact that there is a setting to get the guns and enemies to shut up proves to me that even some developers on the team thought that the games ear-grating dialogue was too much.

Enemy encounters themselves are also uninteresting, the AI doesn’t “evolve” or change in any meaningful way and you’re stuck fighting the same 7 or so visually uninspired and mechanically derivative enemies the entire game. Halo CE actually has fewer enemies, and remains the more interesting game with its more complex enemy behaviour, something High on Life sorely lacks. Weapons lack any real feedback or “oomph”, leaving the gunplay feeling unsatisfying, and there’s so much noise (be it visual or audial) that makes everything unnecessarily hard to process.

It certainly has positives, although any strengths this game has were done better in a multitude of other games. The forum posts for example are a good idea, but the same idea was done better in Hypnospace Outlaw. The gameplay was passable, but countless other shooters did the concept better. Perhaps if this game actually developed on its sources, instead of just alluding to things that were “cool in X so it must be good here”, then it would at least be fun to play. But as it is now however, High on Life is Justin Roiland’s attempt to integrate his pretty stale writing style into an incredibly tedious looter shooter.